Artist

Frank Romero

born East Los Angeles, CA 1941

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Born: East Los Angeles, California, United States
Active in: Los Angeles, California, United States

Biography: Frank Romero grew up in the culturally mixed, middle-class Los Angeles community of Boyle Heights and was well into his career by the time he developed a consciousness of being a Latino artist. During the height of the Chicano civil rights movement in the early 1970s, as a member of the Chicano artists' group "Los Four," he attained a new, high-profile status in the larger art community. It was not until the mid-1980s, however, that Romero could give visual form to some of the emotionally charged political events he had witnessed. [See Death of Rubén Salazar, SAAM, 1993.19.]
Jacquelyn Days Serwer, with contributions by Jonathan P. Binstock, Andrew Connors, Gwendolyn H. Everett, and Lynda Roscoe Hartigan American Kaleidoscope: Themes and Perspectives in Recent Art (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, 1996
: Luce Artist Biography
Frank Romero grew up in the Hispanic, Asian, and Jewish communities of East Los Angeles. He began painting when he was five years old and as a teenager attended LA’s Otis Art Institute, one of the best art schools in the nation. Romero did not think of himself as a Chicano until he began to work with three other artists in an informal group known as Los Four. Los Four and other Hispanic artists throughout the West used wall murals, graffiti, and street theater to protest America’s involvement in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. The police response to antiwar demonstrations in Los Angeles was part of a larger pattern of violence against the minority communities that Romero experienced throughout his life. It takes years for the artist to think through and to paint these episodes in the life of his community, because, he says, “That stuff is hard for me to do, it hurts, it’s frightening” (Los Angeles Times, July 28, 2002 [online]). Romero’s brightly colored paintings celebrate the Los Angeles culture of lowriders and “rascuache,” the art of making something beautiful out of the ordinary.

Videos

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Meet the Artist: Frank Romero
Eduardo Díaz on Frank Romero’s Death of Rubén Salazar
Audio podcast, Nuestra America — Eduardo Diaz, Death of Rubén Salazar (espanol)
Episode 5 - Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art - Frank Romero

FRANK ROMERO: People have told me that I use color very well. I love bright colors, and in fact I’m fascinated with acrylic paint because the colors are so brilliant. In my training, I was told that purple is the opposite of yellow and all of that stuff, but I don’t use that as a theory, I just react instinctively to the way I feel. It’s emotional.

The part of me that’s Mexican or Latino, I think of Mexicans like hot vibrant color. You see that in the way the houses are painted in Mexico and East LA. I grew up in East Los Angeles, and we always had problems and feared the sheriff’s department because their policy was to come down hard on minorities.

“The Death of Ruben Salazar” is one of my police brutality series. He was a newspaper reporter for the LA Times. He was reporting on a demonstration by Latinas against the Vietnam War in ‘70–‘71, and he, after work, they went out with some friends and had a beer at the local saloon, Silver Dollar, and the police got some disturbance call and shot a tear gas canister into the building and hit him in the head and killed him instantly. No one was ever prosecuted. No one was ever found guilty for anything they did. He became a martyr.

If you look at the paintings, they’re very beautiful. They’re in lovely pastel colors and so forth like that. So people are attracted to the image, with these, on an abstract level, and then they see what it’s about, then I hope somehow that they come away with the message.

With color, when one paints into a wet background it tints the colors you apply, and of course the skill is in trying to keep them pure. I’ll do a painting and, you have to excuse me, because I’m not supposed to say this, but I’ll do painting in 30 or 40 minutes and, I’m supposed say 65 years and 40 minutes. I think I stole that from Picasso. But I really enjoy painting in oils and lately even more so in acrylic, because the paint is drying so quickly that you really have to work very fast. Sometimes when you put this paint down the light catches it and it makes it glow. To me it’s a challenge to paint very quickly and assuredly with no mistakes. You just have to do it.

Exhibitions

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Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art

October 25, 2013–March 2, 2014

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art presents the rich and varied contributions of Latino artists in the United States since the mid-twentieth century, when the concept of a collective Latino identity began to emerge.

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Frank Romero

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